Lowy staff talk about the year in books (part 4)

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A combination of new parenthood and a mild addiction to blogs accounts for my lack of serious book reading this year, so my list is short. After flirting with it for several years, I finally made serious inroads into Philip Bobbit's impressive Shield of Achilles. That I didn't completely finish it is much more down to me than the book, and I'm looking forward to seeing what he has to say in his new book on terrorism. I also enjoyed John Patrick Diggins' biography, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom and the Making of History. For writerly skill and drama, it is not a patch on the unfairly criticised Edmund Morris biography, Dutch, but Diggins makes a more concerted attempt to come to grips with Reagan's intellectual roots, which Diggins surprisingly finds in Ralph Waldo Emerson.